After Election, Putin Faces Challenges to Legitimacy

Thousands rallied in Moscow's Pushkin Square on Monday to protest the election of Vladimir V. Putin as president a day earlier. The police there said they had taken 250 people into custody.Credit
James Hill for The New York Times

MOSCOW — A day after claiming an overwhelming victory in Russia’s presidential election, Vladimir V. Putin on Monday faced a range of challenges to his legitimacy, including charges of fraud from international observers and a defiant opposition that vowed to keep him from serving his full six-year term.

While Mr. Putin was still celebrating his win, he received a slap in the face from observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. While finding less of the ballot stuffing and other flagrant violations that they said had marred parliamentary elections in December, the observers said Mr. Putin had faced no real competition and unfairly benefited from lavish government spending on his behalf.

Mr. Putin received milder responses from the European Union and from the United States, which called for an “independent, credible” investigation of fraud allegations but said it was ready to work with him in his new role.

Thousands of antigovernment protesters later gathered in a Moscow square to chant, “Russia without Putin.” Yet the crowd, which the police estimated at 15,000, lacked the giddy optimism that had pervaded earlier rallies.

When the riot police demanded that the crowd disperse after a couple of hours, many refused to leave. The police then swept up the blogger Aleksei Navalny, the most charismatic figure to emerge in this wave of activism, and dozens of other activists and pushed them into police vans. The police said 250 people had been detained, though many were released early Tuesday morning.

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Vladimir V. Putin at his campaign headquarters in Moscow on Monday.Credit
Pool photo by Alexey Druzhinyn

An additional 300 people were detained after a similar event in St. Petersburg.

The arrests drew criticism from the American ambassador, Michael A. McFaul, who said via Twitter that it was “troubling to watch arrests of peaceful demonstrators at Pushkin Square.” Mikhail D. Prokhorov, the billionaire oligarch who placed third in Sunday’s election, wrote over Facebook that he was “indignant over the use of force against people who came to express their civic position.”

In Washington, the reaction to the election was strikingly muted, even restrained. The White House did not comment, and the State Department put out a written statement congratulating the Russian people and saying the United States “looks forward to working with the president-elect after the results are certified and he is sworn in.”

While it noted concerns about “the conditions under which the campaign was conducted, the partisan use of government resources and procedural irregularities on election day,” the statement also praised pledges by the authorities to increase transparency in elections and restore elections for regional governors.

The events followed a commanding victory for Mr. Putin, who finished with 64 percent of the vote to win a term that would extend his rule as Russia’s preeminent leader to 18 years. Leaders of the opposition have vowed to challenge Mr. Putin’s claim to the position, largely by uncovering and disseminating evidence of fraud.

“This was a procedure and not really an election,” Mr. Navalny said late Sunday as he watched the election returns come in at a cafe crowded with supporters. “It’s historic in that up until today, Putin had some claim on legitimacy as a political leader, but now that he has run this fake election marked by mass fraud to become emperor, he has none.”

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In St. Petersburg, left, the police detained one of 300 protesters arrested at a similar Russian rally on Monday.Credit
Alexander Demianchuk/Reuters

Mr. Navalny said, when someone asked, that he was not concerned about being arrested.

“I am just one cog in a very big machine,” he said. “If we have to, we will stay in the streets forever until they accept our demands.”

Mr. Putin was genuinely shaken in December when his United Russia Party performed dismally in parliamentary elections. Those results, widely dismissed as fraudulent, touched off impassioned protests that drew tens of thousands of young Muscovites, who chanted, “Russia without Putin” and “Putin is a thief.”

Mr. Putin managed to consolidate his support in recent weeks, though, and in many regions received nearly double the percentage of votes that United Russia had in December. This election — like every presidential race since 1996 — was a foregone conclusion, since Mr. Putin’s rivals were docile, familiar candidates who had already lost to him and his allies repeatedly.

He also undertook a full-throated populist campaign, increasing pensions and military salaries and promising an avalanche of new government spending. He even ventured into Western-style campaigning, appearing before crowds to exhort them to stand with him.

After the returns came in on Sunday, Mr. Putin was clearly emotionally overwhelmed, and a tear trailed down the side of his face as he addressed supporters. His spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, later said it had been caused by the wind.

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The blogger Aleksei Navalny rejoiced in Moscow after his release from custody Tuesday.Credit
Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters

Since the antigovernment protests began in December, the Kremlin has made it a central goal to ensure that Mr. Putin’s victory would be accepted as legitimate, introducing technologies like transparent ballot boxes and installing 180,000 Web cameras at polling stations.

But interest in fraud had grown intense, and thousands of young people volunteered as observers on Sunday, streaming a steady flow of accusations over Twitter and Facebook.

“The point of elections is that the outcome should be uncertain,” Tonino Picula, a former minister of foreign affairs from Croatia who led one group of observers, said at a news conference. “This was not the case in Russia. There was no real competition, and abuse of government resources ensured that the ultimate winner of the election was never in doubt.”

Video

TimesCast | Russia to Vote

Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin is expected to win a third presidential term in Sunday’s Russian election.

“The international election observation mechanism of certain organizations has transformed into the collection of political or even military-political information,” he said. “The number of observer attempts to penetrate into military units, restricted areas or border zones has grown lately.”

At nightfall on Monday, opposition leaders tried to harness their frustration by calling the rally in Moscow. Uncertainty and anger prevailed as demonstrators began to gather around a statue of Aleksandr Pushkin, one of them holding up a sign that read, “Bye, future.”

“There is a sense that everything has now ended,” said Alyona Krivolapova, 21, a student. “These last elections were not annulled, and these elections will not be. I’m waiting to hear from the organizers what our next move will be.” Reflexively, she computed how old she will be in 2024, when term limits would force Mr. Putin out of office. “All of my best years will have been given to Putin.”

Organizers, it was clear, were grasping to find a way forward. When Sergei Udaltsov, the buzz-cut leader of the Left Front, exhorted demonstrators to remain in the square until Mr. Putin left office, people in the crowd laughed.

Yuri Saprykin, a magazine editor who has helped organize the rallies, wrote earlier in the day that “even considering the falsifications, carousels, blocking of Web cameras, Putin has a majority which nothing and no one can oppose.” But others in the crowd seemed undaunted by the juggernaut of Mr. Putin’s victory.

“I don’t think he will remain in office for the full six years,” said Viktor Shvykov, 32, a former police captain. “He has a very short period of time to make some serious changes or the dissatisfaction will grow rapidly.”

Mr. Putin offered no comment on the protests on Monday night, though in a meeting with his rivals he promised to follow up all allegations of fraud. Konstantin V. Remchukov, editor of the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta, said that he had never seen Mr. Putin as emotionally affected as he appeared after his victory on Sunday night, and that “it was obvious that he put himself fully into this campaign.” He added that in the flush of this triumph, Mr. Putin may underestimate the urgency of demands for change coming from the public.

“If Putin ignores this crowd, if he thinks he’s got victory, he will be the loser, because their ideas will defeat any system,” Mr. Remchukov said. “He doesn’t have time. He has to adopt the international standards of democracy right now.”

Reporting was contributed by David M. Herszenhorn, Glenn Kates, Anastasia Sadovskaya and David Carr from Moscow, and Steven Lee Myers from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on March 6, 2012, on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Fraud Allegations Detailed and Protesters Detained After Putin Victory. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe